UBC: Sport targeting or social engineering?

Historic varsity sports imperilled as university looks to fund ‘wellness’

Varsity hockey, which includes Thunderbirds players such as Brad Hoban, left, Joe Antilla, centre, and Neil Manning, is also under the microscope of UBC’s Sport Targeting Review

Photograph by: Mark van Manen
, Vancouver Sun

VANCOUVER — It’s a great time to be a quidditch player at UBC.

All those young wizards and witches riding broomsticks around the Point Grey campus, chasing Quaffles, Bludgers and Snitches while playing Harry Potter’s game, could soon get the recognition and funding from UBC they recently requested on Twitter. Because quidditch players are athletes, too, you know.

And to be an ultimate Frisbee player these days is to possess copyright on the steam engine at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

The possibilities for sports funding from the University of B.C.’s Athletics and Recreation Department are infinite. Even hackey sackers, should the hippies get organized and form teams and remember which ones they’re on, could get hemp T-shirts emblazoned with the prestigious Thunderbird logo.

This is the school, after all, that for a few days in August evicted from its home field the UBC football team because Thunderbird Stadium was needed for an Frisbee tournament.

The university’s ongoing Sport Targeting Review, which looks like a social-engineering experiment gone mad, promises to create sporting opportunities for all kinds of marginalized recreationalists.

Opportunities for varsity football and hockey players and many other serious, mainstream athletes? Maybe not so much.

“They have a lot of people involved who, frankly, have no knowledge about varsity athletics,” prominent UBC alumnus Marty Zlotnik fumed about the review. “They had an agenda. Their goal was to reduce varsity athletics and improve their wellness program. I don’t know where their mandate comes from. I don’t think they know what they’re talking about. It’s all very upsetting.”

A brief history of STR: Two years ago, soon-to-be outgoing UBC president Stephen Toope hired Louise Cowin as the school’s vice-president of students, a position that gave her oversight of the athletics department.

Longtime athletic director Bob Philip had conducted a review of varsity sports, but Cowin apparently didn’t like the report. She commissioned her own review that ended with a new model for athletics.

Cowin put herself on a “think-tank” that included UBC’s senior adviser to the president, Dick Price, Canadian Sports Centre Pacific CEO Wendy Pattenden, women-in-sport advocate Marion Lay, and Prof. Wendy Frisby, former chairwoman of women’s and gender studies at UBC.

Draw your own conclusions about the composition of Cowin’s committee.

The five-tiered athletics model that UBC has adopted puts national/professional athletes at the top, possibly because UBC expects them to be funded by their own national sports organizations. Varsity sports is second. The next three tiers are competitive sports clubs, which is what some varsity sports will become, community clubs and intramurals.

UBC has a stated goal to become the healthiest campus in the world, and to help fund the “wellness” plan the school is targeting its 29 varsity teams to see which can be eliminated to free up money to encourage broader student participation in sports. Quidditch and ultimate players rejoice!

It’s important to note that each full-time student at UBC is charged a fee of about $200 that directly funds “athletics and recreation.” Cowin’s review appears to conclude there is too much athletics and not enough recreation.

To execute her plan, Cowin hired Ashley Howard last summer to replace Philip, who was moved into an advisory position a few months after Cowin arrived. Howard, who left a successful run as chief executive officer of Scottish Swimming to return home to Vancouver, is responsible for pushing along the STR project.

She also happens to be an ultimate Frisbee player.

Howard said the criteria for judging the merits of each varsity sport are close to being finalized and UBC expects to announce the survivors next spring.

And, yes, among the 29 varsity teams, foundation sports like football and hockey are on the table.

And, yes, alumni donors like Zlotnik, a UBC law grad and chair of the Thunderbird Golf Society, are fairly outraged at what is being done to a varsity sports program that has been around for a century and in the last 10 years produced more championships than any other Canadian university.

Howard said during a lengthy interview with The Vancouver Sun that the athletics department can’t financially sustain 29 varsity teams. Skeptics note, however, the university recently dumped $11 million from the cost of a new $40-million aquatic centre on to the athletic department books, manufacturing a budget strain.

“It’s unbelievable to me that a university with the best record in Canada in terms of varsity sports would say: ‘This doesn’t fit the mould of what we want,’” Zlotnik said. “They want a wellness program for students to reach out and participate in and lead healthy lives. I don’t disagree with that at all. But I don’t think that has much to do with the varsity athletics program. They’re going to marginalize that program.

“Why should I spend all my time supporting a golf program that may not be there in two years?

When people stop giving, there’s going to be a quiet revolution. It will take the university a couple of years to figure out what happened, but it will be a financial mess.”

Donations, most of them from UBC alumni, are one of the biggest funding sources for athletics, which has received $50 million in contributions in the last decade.

The university's own research indicates that while about one-in-11 former students donates money to UBC, the rate of giving among athletics department alumni is two-in-five.

Honoured by the university in 2008 for his fundraising and commitment to the UBC sports, Zlotnik founded the Millennium Breakfast, the biggest annual fundraising event for athletics. It has generated $9 million over nine years.

But Zlotnik told The Sun that the 2014 breakfast will probably be the last because UBC administration has informed him it will no longer honour former president Martha Piper’s pledge to match donations to the athletic department.

The Millennium Breakfast appears to be not just the tip of the iceberg, but the start of a huge ice field facing Cowin and Howard.

“I was approached by someone who has a family trust with $500,000 that was going to go to UBC, but it won’t happen if they cut varsity athletics,” Dr. Derek Swain, a Vancouver psychologist who is organizing an alumni counter-offensive to the STR, said. “They’re cutting off their own noses.”

Swain said one of his biggest concerns is that neither Cowin nor Howard has any experience with varsity sports and, new to the university, little appreciation for Thunderbird history and tradition. He echoed Zlotnik’s belief there is no mandate for a dramatic change in athletics and this is social engineering driven by a few and affecting many.

Part of Cowin’s review process was a survey sent to students and alumni.

“Their survey was based on the assumption there were going to be cuts,” Swain said. “It didn’t ask about history or tradition and there was nowhere to say, ‘No, don’t cut anything.’ Whatever feedback they’ve gotten from it is inaccurate because it was garbage-in-garbage-out kind of thing. What they’re really doing is massaging data to meet their foregone conclusion.”

Doug Mitchell, the former Canadian Football League commissioner and a member of UBC’s board of governors, told The Province last week: “I’ve been told they have a mandate but you certainly can’t get it from any of the written information. It seems to be coming from the vice-president of student services (Cowin) through the managing director of athletics (Howard).”

Cowin, responsible for an embarrassing coaching-hire fiasco last winter that left UBC defending itself before a Human Rights Tribunal after Marc Rizzardo was told he had the women’s soccer job, then didn’t, is selective about media interviews.

She refused to talk to me last year about Rizzardo, and declined, through UBC’s communications office, to answer questions about the Sport Targeting Review and her mandate to conduct it.

Ironically, the university boasts online about the “transparency” of its STR.

Notes posted from a STR committee meeting in September pledge transparency while at the same time, comically, urge “confidentiality on sensitive topics.”

Cowin did write a letter to the editor insisting nothing about the UBC review has been pre-determined.

But this isn’t a mere departmental review. By name, UBC is “targeting” varsity sports and Howard said in her interview with The Sun it will be “wrong” if athletics emerges from this review with the same 29 varsity teams.

It is a difficult time on campus for coaches and student-athletes, who believed when they were making four-year commitments to UBC that the university was equally committed to them. No changes will occur before the 2015-16 school year.

“When you look at everything, I don’t see how they could do it,” Thunderbird football coach Shawn Olson said. “Cutting the football program would be like cutting the faculty of law or saying we’re not going to have a music department. That’s not the peer group UBC lives in. Certain things, you need to have.”

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